Review: Normal People by Sally Rooney

It would be  easy to sum up Normal People in one word. Overhyped. After all, Normal People has been discussed endlessly in the media, on Goodreads, on social media sites such as Instagram (better known among its many devotees as bookstagram.) The book has already been made into a BBC Three/Hulu series with a second series forthcoming and is reached the saturation point where it's possible to find Normal People gifs and memes on twitter and facebook. If readers are well, a little sick of hearing about Normal People, then who could possibly blame them? 

On the other hand, Normal People clocked up some fabulous achievements. It was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize and the Women's Prize for fiction in 2018, and it won the Costa Book Award and Book of the Year for the British Book Awards. On the other side of the Atlantic, Kirkus gave the novel one of their coveted starred reviews. And did I mention that the author was in her mid-twenties at the time the book was published? It is little wonder that people want to talk about it.

However, like all books that are endlessly discussed and talked about, they inevitably find themselves in the hands of readers who pick them up, expecting something fabulous, something that they personally will love and come away empty handed? Was that my experience reading Normal People? Well, not quite. It's a good book. It's just not without its flaws.

Set in Ireland, Normal People tells the story of a pair who meet while they are still in school. Marianne is the daughter of a wealthy but cool and detached widow, while Conner is the son of the lady who cleans Marianne's house. At school, they pretend not to know each other. After all, this just wouldn't do in their town. He's the star of the school soccer team and popular among his peers. She is academic and a loner who steers clear of their classmates. Outside of school, however, a covert, friends with benefits arrangement takes place. Surely, this cannot end well?

Skipping through months at a time to tell the story of the pivotal points in their relationship, Rooney cleverly weaves together the story of two people who are at their most real selves when they are together, but feel that they cannot share their relationship with the outside world. Over time, the dynamics between the pair shift--at university it is Marianne who is popular and who fits in, while Conner struggles to adjust to his new circumstances. The pair suffer great difficulty in communicating with one another, in a way that I soon started to find infuriating. Okay, I get that Marianne and Conner both had rich inner lives, but does anyone really put so much thought into hoping that a gesture, such as a shrug, could communicate several different, and important things? Then again, in the story these gestures rarely achieved their desired effect. Maybe that was the point.

Where Normal People shines is in its meditations on peer pressure and domestic violence, handling both subjects realistically and sympathetically, which is a tough call for any author. Sally Rooney shows some true insight into human nature, and the sides of people that they often keep hidden. It's worth reading Normal People for that alone. For me, it was a good book. Maybe not a classic. Maybe not a book that will go on my list of favourite reads for 2021. And maybe it is a bit overhyped.

But Normal People is the one thing it set out to be. A good book.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Peppermint Patty: I Cried and Cried and Cried

Image
Unrequited love is a common theme in the Peanuts Comics and is one that I have previously explored on this blog. We know that Lucy loves Schroeder, Sally loves Linus and Charlie Brown has a crush on the unseen, unnamed and utterly unattainable Little Redhaired Girl. But perhaps the saddest unrequited love stories from the comic is that which ran in late June 1972. It was the series of strips where the usually self-confident Peppermint Patty came face-to-face with the Little Redhaired Girl with the intention of thumping her and then something surprising happened: Here we have a usually self-confident girl, who is funny, unashamedly herself and talented at sports reduced to tears by the realisation of who she is not and never can be. I really feel for her in this series of comic strips. She knows that Charlie Brown can never love her, when he is so hung up over a girl who represents a supposedly ideal feminine beauty. Fortunately Linus, the most spiritual member of the Pean...
Read more

Charlie Brown, Lucy Van Pelt and the Football

Image
One of the longest, and arguably, most infuriating, running gags in Charles Schulz's otherwise brilliant Peanuts comic strip, is where Lucy promises to hold a football for Charlie Brown and then pulls it away at the last minute, causing Charlie Brown to fall flat on his back. A typical strip looks like this: Source: Go Comics The gag is one of the darker themes in the strip. It works on the concept that every year, Lucy promises to hold a football for Charlie Brown. Every year, Charlie Brown is initially filled with doubt but is eventually pushed on by a kind of optimism that perhaps, this time, Lucy might just let him kick it after all. As a metaphor for life, it is pretty simple. It talks of the moments when we choose to put our trust in people who have let us down only to be taken by surprise when they let us down, again. Lucy is, arguably, one of the crueller characters in the comic. Described as crabby by the other characters, she is often selfish, takes delight in wilfully hu...
Read more

Phrases and Idioms: Tickets on Himself

To have tickets on himself: (Australian slang.) To be conceited or vain. To have an overinflated opinion of oneself.  He's got tickets on himself if he thinks that any woman would fall for that. I was thinking about this particular bit of Australian slang the other day, after my boss said, "He's got tickets on himself," to describe the actions of a particular individual. At the time, I smiled, knowing exactly what the boss meant. Later on, I started to ponder on this unusual phrase and wondered where it might have come from. A search on google helped me find the definition, but that was about all. There are no references to it being used in pop culture or literature (if you find one, let me know,) and at the time of writing this post, Tickets on Himself was not listed on Urban Dictionary. (I tried to add it, but the fuckers rejected my definition. They probably think I have tickets on myself or something for trying to add a relatively common piece of A...
Read more